novel, when Coningsby first visits Manchester, Disraeli even suggests that industrial machines will inspire the imagination, thereby not only reanimating but literally incorporating the people.
A machine is a slave that neither brings nor bears degradation; it is a being endowed with the greatest degree of energy, and acting under the greatest degree of excitement, yet free at the same time from all passion and emotion… And why should one say that the machine does not live?… It moves with more regularity than a man. And has it not a voice? Does not the spindle sing like a merry girl at her work, and the steam-engine roar in joy chorus, like a strong artisan handling his lusty tools, and gaining a fair day's wages for a fair day's toil?
While Disraeli rapidly abandons the image of the happy machine, this figure does reveal two significant tendencies inherent in the Young Englanders' politics. First, the image of the happy machine converts the fact of an impoverished laboring class into a picture of singing workers, then displaces these imaginary workers (and the entire problem of unemployment) with the vision of an equally melodious automaton. Like the idea that the «peasantry» will be content with May Day celebrations instead of food, in other words, the image of the singing machine acknowledges class concerns but subordinates them to an idealized (non)solution. Second, the image of the happy machine alludes to but then completely effaces the problem of gender. In the idealized version of politics Disraeli develops in this novel, there is only one kind of subject. While this subject is theoretically representative-or even androgynous, like the machines making machines that so infatuate -516- Coningsby-we soon discover that this subject is actually gendered male.
The process by which gender gets written as masculine provides the narrative energy that is otherwise absent from Coningsby. If the primary plot of the novel is an additive account of the hero's transformation, which is indebted to the picaresque novel, then the two subplots that contain the novel's energizing conflicts are influenced by the Gothic novel and centrally concern gender. The more prominent of these subplots, which also reflects the influence of eighteenth-century inheritance plots, seems to be about women, since it focuses on Coningsby's mother and Millbrook's daughter Edith. Initially, Disraeli presents the boy's dim memories of his mother as 'his only link to human society'; certainly, his thoughts of her constitute the character's only sign of psychological complexity. Disraeli first develops this complexity when Coningsby is inexplicably attracted to a portrait that hangs in Millbrook's house, then elaborates it when Coningsby falls in love with Edith Millbrook. Using Gothic conventions and language, Disraeli creates Coningsby's psychological depth by stressing the haunting association between Edith and this picture, which depicts Coningsby's mother. After Coningsby meets Edith in Paris, the narrator tells us, 'a beautiful countenance that was alternately the face in the mysterious picture [i.e., his mother], and then that of Edith, haunted [Coningsby] under all circumstances.' Presumably, no physical resemblance connects the two women, since the mystery of Coningsby's mother turns out to involve only the fact that Millbrook once loved her, not that she is Edith's mother too. In fact, what actually connects the two women and enables them to serve a single narrative function is that both point to the central role played by another secret relationship-that among three men.
Coningsby's attempts to realize his 'secret joy' through marriage to Edith are baffled for much of the novel by this other secret. Although he does not know what it is, Coningsby knows that some secret passion must exist; 'political opinion, or even party passion, could not satisfactorily account' for the 'vindictive feud' that divides Monmouth and Millbrook. But while Coningsby is correct in suspecting a secret, he is incorrect in thinking that his mother is its real origin. When Coningsby makes his feelings about Edith clear, Millbrook reveals that he and Monmouth are actually bound to each other by hatred for Coningsby's father-the first because he stole Coningsby's -517- mother from Millbrook, who was engaged to marry her; and the second for reasons that remain unclear. We learn only that 'Lord Monmouth hated his younger son, who had married against his consent, a woman to whom the son was devoted.' As a consequence of this hatred, Monmouth «hunted» the widow from his family, and, in retaliation for the sins of the father and son, Millbrook now persecutes Monmouth, first by purchasing an estate the old man coveted and then by winning the parliamentary seat Monmouth intended for his functionary Rigby.
The feud between the two men, along with their mutual, impassioned hatred for a third, therefore serves to convert Disraeli's idealized politics into the stuff of a novel by animating what passes for Coningsby's psychological complexity. This originary relationship among men makes another appearance in the novel, once more in connection with Coningsby but this time in the form of passionate love, not hate. Disraeli introduces this 'frantic sensibility' in the guise of schoolboy friendship. 'At school,' the narrator explains,
friendship is a passion. It entrances the being; it tears the soul. All loves of after-life can never bring its rapture, or its wretchedness; no bliss so absorbing, no pangs of jealousy or despair so crushing and so keen! What tenderness and devotion; what illimitable confidence; infinite revelations of inmost thoughts; what ecstatic present and romantic future; what bitter estrangements and what melting reconciliations; what scenes of wild recrimination, agitating explanations, passionate correspondence; what insane sensitiveness, and what frantic sensibility; what earthquakes of the heart and whirlwinds of the soul are confined in that simple phrase, a schoolboy's friendship!
Predictably, the unformed Coningsby is not the bearer but the object of this 'passionate admiration.' When Coningsby saves his young admirer from drowning, Oswald Millbrook pours out his feelings to his hero in what can only be called a love letter. 'I want… that we may be friends,' the besotted Millbrook writes, 'and that you will always know that there is nothing I will not do for you, and that I like you better than any fellow at Eton… Not because you saved my life; though that is a great thing, but because before that I would have done anything for you.'
It takes some time for Coningsby to replicate Oswald's outburst and even longer for Oswald to fulfill his promise. Along with the feud between their elders, however, this passionate homosocial attachment -518- provides the motor of the romantic plot and the terms by which Disraeli idealizes politics. It is because Coningsby saved young Millbrook that he first visits the Millbrook home, where he sees the spellbinding portrait and Edith; it is because he loves Edith that he defies his grandfather; and it is because Oswald loves Coningsby that the former eventually persuades his father to relinquish his parliamentary seat. Even more important, it is because Coningsby returns Oswald's passionate affection that his grandfather disinherits him, which event first reduces Coningsby to the point that he needs Millbrook's patronage and then permits Oswald to fulfill his vow. Disraeli presents Coningsby's «impassioned» advances to Oswald as a metaphorical seduction, advanced by a man made desperate by the frustration of his heterosexual desires. After Mr. Millbrook reveals the secret of his feud with Monmouth, Coningsby «flings» himself into Oswald's arms and hurries his friend toward Coningsby Castle, which Oswald has been forbidden to enter. Despite Oswald's hesitation, a thunderstorm drives the young men toward shelter, just as another storm had kept Coningsby and Edith secluded in a cottage long past dinner the day before. 'Hurried on by Coningsby,' Oswald 'could make no resistance.' Once inside the castle, and professing himself 'reckless as the tempest,' Coningsby orders the servants away 'and for a moment felt a degree of wild satisfaction in the company of the brother of Edith.'
That Coningsby's 'wild satisfaction' is transgressive is made clear both by the abrupt termination that Mr. Rigby's entrance brings to the midnight supper (and the chapter) and by Monmouth's irate response to Rigby's representation of 'the younger Millbrook quite domiciled at the Castle.' Disraeli is also careful to discredit such homosocial outbursts by other means. When Coningsby goes up to Cambridge, for example, he is represented as thinking with 'disgust of the impending dissipation of an University, which could only be an exaggeration of their coarse frolics at school.' Despite such explicit disclaimers, however, and despite the fact that their attachment to each other is sanctioned by the existence of Oswald's sister, Disraeli presents the relationships among the men as more vital, more long-lived, and more influential than anything else in the world. The sequence of formative conversations that constitutes the novel's primary plot, in fact, can be read as a series of repetitions of the protopolitical conversations that first 'agitated [the schoolboys'] young hearts' and in which politics was so obviously simply the vehicle for other passions. The 'keen relish' with which the boys read and discuss accounts - 519- of politics and the 'excited intelligence' with which they worship their political heroes hint at the homoerotics with which Disraeli associates all interactions among men. This association returns in passing when we learn that male political canvassers wear dresses to round up voters, and with force when Coningsby is reunited with his friend at Oxford. Their 'congress of friendship' unbroken, each man 'poured forth his mind without stint,' and the narrator blesses their union even as he describes the conversation in such a way as to suggest that one man-not two-is present. 'Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervour.'
